Connecting heart to heart
Storytelling in my children’s librarian days
I’ve always been a bit of a performer. My earliest photos are of me in a ballet tutu taking a pose for dad’s camera. I loved the idea of taking to the stage and had a leading role in my high school play.
Fast forward to when I was first starting out as a branch librarian in a small Victorian country town. There was a really active theatre group. – dear reader, I joined. My first role was as one of the leading fairies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Iolanthe. I wore a sort of tutu (again).
The major musical performances were always held in the dead of winter and I have such fond memories of all of us huddling around an open fire in the back of the old theatre while a crew of people applied makeup, did our hair and ran around with costumes. It was my first experience of a small tightknit community connected by the love of stage lights and I loved it.
Connecting with people on stage and through storytelling felt like a way to touch people on a heart to heart level. It was the start of a new world for me. As an actor, writer, director, storyteller and even bellydancer!
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered my dad had been active in a local drama group when my parents moved to the coastal suburb of Beaumaris . At that time, it was a small community where there were still dirt streets winding through the bayside tea-trees.
I realised this legacy the other night when I was giving an online workshop. Over 40 people as a “virtual” audience interacting with me as I was sharing my stories of creating art from your heart and awakening your intuition to create.
There was no backstage crew for costumes or makeup, no after performance champagne. I walked through the door from my office/studio out into the kitchen and life returned to normal in the blink of an eye.
But for those past 90 minutes I had been stretching myself out across the continents, storytelling and connecting with women from all over Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia. It still makes me feel like I was on stage again, a fairy in a tutu with stage lights signing my heart out to connect with them on a personal heart to heart level. Ah the wonders of technology…
Performing, age 8?
